WOMEN’S FIGURE SKATING : Kadavy Vaults to Championship as Kerrigan and Trenary Falter

As part of a local television station’s adopt-a-child program, an awe-struck 6-year-old girl was ushered into the Sports Arena one morning this week to meet figure skater Nancy Kerrigan.

The girl could think of only one question for the national champion: “Do you ever fall down?”

Kerrigan could not help but laugh.

She has been falling down so much this year that the title of the recent movie starring Michael Douglas could have been about her.

Her ice escapades continued during the Hershey’s Kisses Pro-Am at the Sports Arena on Wednesday night, when she spent almost as much time off her feet as on them during her 4 1/2-minute freestyle program. She fell three times and maintained her balance only by touching her hand to the ice after another jump.

The problems that she and the 1990 world champion, Jill Trenary, experienced allowed Caryn Kadavy, the 1987 bronze medalist at the World Championships, to vault from third place after Tuesday night’s technical program into first, for which Kadavy was rewarded with a check for $40,000.

Kerrigan held on for second place, while her runner-up in this year’s national championships, 15-year-old Lisa Ervin, was third.

This was not the manner in which Kerrigan had hoped to end the season.

After finishing third in the 1992 Winter Olympics and second in the World Championships, Kerrigan, 23, was considered the heir apparent to Kristi Yamaguchi as the world’s ice queen.

But she won the national championship in January at Phoenix only because the other contenders found the ice more slippery than she did, and she had a catastrophic freestyle program while finishing fifth last month in the World Championships at Prague.

In fact, despite the medals she won in 1992, Kerrigan has not appeared comfortable on the ice for an entire competition since 1991, when she emerged as a world-class skater by finishing third in the world. She attributed her success that year in large part to a sports psychologist.

She said this week that she has decided to start going again in an attempt to deal with the pressure she feels in competitions.